


Right Hand

by WashiPuppy



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: But like mild dismemberment, Dismemberment, Kuron is a person too, Lance (Voltron) Angst, M/M, Puns & Word Play, Shiro (Voltron) Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-20 06:35:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16131677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WashiPuppy/pseuds/WashiPuppy
Summary: Keith returns to the team with with an extra surprise that triggers Shiro to lose himself slightly earlier than scheduled. Lance gets caught up in Shiro’s chronic migranes and existential crisis and tries to help him through.A story of right hands, conversations in the dark, and being human.





	Right Hand

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetad, but slightly over-edited.

Lance groaned as he awoke, a dull pain pulsing over his head in time to his heartbeat. He scrunched his eyes shut and pressed a hand to his face, waiting for the pain to fade down to a muted ache before he dared open his eyes again. It took a moment for his vision to clear, but even then there wasn’t much to look at. He was lying on the floor in a dark room where a dim light blinked at regular intervals from somewhere in the middle of the room, allowing him to see a few architectural lines that told Lance he was still in the Castle of Lions. But he had no idea where exactly within the castle he was or how he’d gotten there. What was the last thing he remembered?

The memories came back in a confusing rush, falling into a jagged timeline --

_\-- Being in the command room, a call coming in from an unknown vessel using Keith’s authentication codes. --_

_\-- Keith’s serious face appearing on the large screen in the command room, dressed in the dark purples and blacks of his blade uniform. Shiro greeting him with a wide, fond smile that Keith didn’t reciprocate. Two figures behind him, one in black and red and one in in grey and black that Lance remembers thinking was kind of small for a Blade. --_

_\-- Keith saying “Allura, you have to listen to me,” speaking insistently and with an air of command in his voice that he’d never had before, completely ignoring Lance’s comment on his appearance. “That’s not the real Shiro! You need to restrain him now!” --_

_\-- Shiro freezing, eyes wide and horrified, body trembling as Lance turned to look at him. --_

_\-- Keith adjusting the camera of his com unit to properly show the person in grey and black behind him, revealing… Shiro! He looked more like he did before he’d left for the Kerberos mission, he had no white streak in his hair and no facial scar, but hr was unmistakably Shiro. --_

_\-- Confusion --_

_\-- Chaos --_

_\-- Pain, and then… this. --_

He sat up sharply, vision tunneling at the sudden change in position before it cleared and he had a chance to scan the area for danger. The intermittent light only really let him see the outline of the objects around him, but the room he was in appeared to be filled sparsely with broken devices and abandoned equipment. It looked like any of the many unused rooms that the Castle had otherwise, although perhaps it was a little more industrial than usual. Were they near the engines? Or the Crystal Chamber?

It took Lance a few dim flashes of light to notice the other figure in the room, hunched against the wall with his head pressed firmly into his knees, white forelock and white leg armor standing out in the muted light. His hands dug into his hair, and large pieces of the upper half of his armour were discarded against the wall as though they had been pulled off in a desperate rush.

“Shiro…” Lance whispered before he could stop himself and think that maybe he shouldn’t announce that he was awake to the only person around who could possibly have dragged him to this room.

Shiro... Shiro? Whoever he was, he flinched violently and looked up at Lance. “Don’t,” he whispered harshly through clenched teeth. “Don’t, I...” He tensed and grimaced in pain before he could finish. An unnatural light flashed in his eyes that was mirrored faintly through the exposed undersuit on his right arm, fading so quickly that Lance doubted he’d have been able to see it at all if the room had been lit the way the castle usually was. Shiro screwed his eyes shut before the glow had fully faded and hunched down on himself, hiding his face behind his knees. He looked so small and afraid that Lance’s heart ached for him. 

Lance rolled up onto his hands and knees and began crawling carefully towards him. It seemed safer and less threatening to stay low and at Shiro’s level. “Another headache?” He asked, keeping his voice as quiet and smooth as possible. 

Shiro took a shaky breath, the hands gripping his hair tensing harsh enough that Lance worried for a moment that he’d actually pull clumps of it out. 

“Hey, it’s okay, okay?” Lance said as soothingly as he could. Shiro peered up at him from behind his knees with disbelieving eyes, but the tension in his shoulders lessened and he made no aggressive moves, so Lance decided to press on. He crept closer, feeling like a cat trying to approach an easily startled bird. “Just, um,” he hesitated, looking around the room again before focusing back in on Shiro.

_\-- Keith’s return. -- Another Shiro. -- “You need to restrain him now!” --_

“You mind telling me what’s going on right now?” Lance asked. “Because I’m still confused. Like, super confused.”

Shiro laughed without any real humour, harsh and sharp. “Do you remember me telling you I didn’t feel like myself?”

“Yes?” Lance replied tentatively, thinking back to a conversation in a hall when the team had been running low on oxygen and Lance felt like death was closing in on them while he could do nothing but stand around helplessly and watch it happen. 

That was the moment that Shiro had first opened up to him as an equal, of course he remembered it. They'd spoken more often since then, growing closer with each night they sat together in the lounges and each post-mission talk in the light of an alien planet. Although they'd never discussed it directly, those conversations helped Lance come to terms with knowing his feelings for Allura weren't reciprocated and would probably never be, giving him the chance to put them to rest. Those conversations turned the flickers of admiration and affection in his chest for his hero into something warmer and stronger. He hoped he'd helped Shiro too, even if just a little. But Lance would always remember that conversation and that hallway, he just wasn’t completely clear on the link between Shiro not feeling like himself and Lance suddenly losing consciousness and waking up in an abandoned storeroom in the castle. Unless- Wait.

“Apparently, there was a reason for that,” Shiro continued before Lance could fully formulate his question. He winced again, hands flexing against his head before he slowly and deliberately spread his fingers and pulled them away. He raised his head to fix Lance with a grave expression made more unnerving by the intermittent light flashing across his features, giving them an eerie cast. “I’m not… I’m not myself. It’s clear to me now that despite what I remember, what I think I know, I’m not me-” he cut himself off with a grimace. “Not _him_. I’m not the _Shiro_ you knew.‘’

“Oh,” Lance said, not quite managing to sound as surprised as he probably should have been. Shiro’s eyes narrowed, and Lance fought not to shift uncomfortably under the sudden intent focus. He swallowed back the words that he wanted to say in favour of a half-hearted “Hey, come on. We don’t know that for sure, do we?”

“No, I know.” Shiro shook his head, stretching his legs out and slumping forward to stare unseeingly at the ground in front of him, every line in his body screaming of tension and exhaustion. His voice was weak and tremulous, as though he were confessing to some great shame. “If I’m honest, I’ve known for a while. I tried to tell myself it was just some new mental issue I’d picked up from being captured again, but… Me not being really _me_ just makes too much sense. It feels right. You know it too, don’t you?” He looked up, eyes locking on to Lance’s insistently. “You know that I’m… I’m someone else. There’s something else inside me, and it's…” He flinched again, grabbing at his head and hissing in pain, that unnatural light returning to his eyes before they were squeezed shut and his whole body curled in on itself.

Lance watched every movement cautiously. “So… am I a hostage or what?” He asked, deciding it was probably safe to voice his primary concern.

A bitter laugh answered him. “I guess?” Shiro uncurled himself as the spike of pain passed, letting his hands fall limply into his lap. “I wasn’t thinking. I panicked and…” He bit his lip, looking over Lance before turning completely away, leaving Lance to stare at his profile and wonder what exactly Shiro saw when he looked at Lance, if he could see his expression at all when he was either in the dark or lit from behind by the blinking light. “I don’t know, I just needed you with me. You’re my right-hand man, I just-” He cut himself off, taking a shaky breath before turning to look Lance squarely in the eye. 

Lance was struck by how frightened Shiro looked.

_Right hand man._

“Something in me keeps telling me that I need to be in control and I need to keep you all at arm's length. But when I saw him- that other me- it was like something else took over. Like I couldn’t control my body anymore.” He screwed his eyes shut and swallowed before opening them again, settling into a more controlled and focused posture. More like the Shiro that Lance was used to. “The only thought that felt like mine was ‘I need Lance, he makes me feel like myself. Human. Lance makes me feel real.’ So of course the logical thing to do was kidnap you and run away,” he finished wryly.

Lance crept closer again, swallowing around his suddenly dry tongue. He was close enough to reach out and touch Shiro’s ankle now,if he’d wanted to. “I make you feel real?” he asked.

Shiro went still, barely even breathing. The only part of him that moved was his eyes, darting over Lance’s face. Finally, he took a sharp breath in and nodded. “Yeah.”

“Wow,” Lance whispered in awe, breath catching in his throat before the word could become anything more. That was probably the most romantic and intense thing anyone had ever said to him. Too bad about the circumstances, but beggars couldn’t be choosers and all that. Still, he shook himself mentally and returned his focus to the problem at hand rather than the rush of emotion he was experiencing. “And do you feel like you’re in control of your body now?” 

Shiro gave the question serious thought, cut short by another wave of pain making him tense up and hiss. Lance looked between his eyes and his right arm quickly, taking note of the flicker of magenta light that lit up both before it died out again. Now that he was looking at it closely, the light wasn’t the only thing unusual going on with Shiro’s arm. The part of it that connected to Shiro’s body was bulkier, as though swollen despite that part being Galra metal, not flesh. Prosthetics didn’t usually swell up.

“I think so,” Shiro replied once the spike of pain had subsided and he’d caught his breath. “You know that feeling where you’re so tired you black out for a second occasionally? Sometimes the pain gets worse, and I feel like that for a moment. The headaches come in clusters with a break between.” Another flinch and a grip on his head, accompanied by a broken, pained cry that had Lance scrambling the remaining short distance between them, ignoring the alarms in his head that said it was dangerous to get too close and that magenta lights usually meant danger, no matter how dim. This was Shiro here, whatever else he was. Lance couldn’t just leave him in pain.

Seconds passed, and some of the tension finally dropped out of Shiro’s shoulders, although he didn’t completely relax. “It’s getting worse though,” he confessed in a small voice. The blinking light cast long, haunted shadows across his face as he looked up to Lance. “Something in this room helped, but I don’t think it’ll work much longer. You need to get out of hear. Find the others, tell them that I’m not really me. Whatever this thing inside me is trying to make me do, don’t let me do it. Don’t let me hurt you,” he said, voice caught between issuing an order and begging.

“Yeah, that’s not happening,” Lance said, placing one hand awkwardly on Shiro’s right shoulder while the other one took his left wrist to move his hand away from where he was almost tearing his hair out, “I’m not leaving you like this.” Shiro opened his mouth to protest, but Lance spoke first. “Hey, I don’t want to alarm you more than you’re already alarmed, if that’s even possible, but your arm has changed a little bit.”

Shiro stared at him in confusion, so Lance looked pointedly to his left, where Shiro’s right hand was still tangled in his short hair. He dropped it and looked over it blankly eyes widening when he saw that the prosthetic seemed to have changed shape. Besides just being thicker around the top, Lance could now see that his hand had changed, each finger longer and more pointed. As they watched, a magenta light shone faintly through the undersuit, lighting up along what would be the seams of the prosthetic and flexing outwards as though breathing. The light was echoed in Shiro’s eyes for the fraction of a second he could keep them open before the pain forced his eyes shut and he hunch forward, bringing his head down onto Lance’s shoulder with another aborted cry. 

Lance’s hands instinctively moved to cup the back of Shiro’s head and scratch over the short undercut before he recovered his wits enough to remember a few tricks he’d read about for helping with severe headaches. Biting his lips with determination, he dragged his fingers down to rub firmly along Shiro’s neck, pressing into the tendons and muscle on either side of his spine. He wasn’t sure it was helping, but it made him feel like he was at least doing something positive. If it helped the pain go away faster, or if Shiro was less tense when it had passed, he’d call that a win.

Without warning, Shiro’s right arm swung around and grabbed the back of Lance’s neck, fingers scalding even through his undersuit. He bit out a pained yelp and flinched, digging his fingers into Shiro’s neck a little harder than he’d meant to. Shiro’s hand tightened and burned hotter in retaliation, so Lance bit back the shriek that wanted to escape from his chest for fear of aggravating the burning hand more.

It felt like like an eternity before Shiro relaxed against him with a groan, but it was probably under a tick later. His prosthetic hand remained fixed around the back of Lance’s neck, cooling quickly from it’s active state but still putting pressure against skin that wasn’t sure whether it should be hurting yet or not.. 

“You still here?” Lance asked, trying to keep the fear out of his voice.

“Yeah,” Shiro responded horsley. He cleared his throat and raised his head. “Yeah, I’m still here.”

“Okay. Well, again, don’t want to alarm you further, but you’re kind of grabbing on to me a bit tight there,” Lance said, his voice rising to a painful squeak as he continued to bable, the flow of words helping him calm down. “Which I don’t normally mind, but this probably isn’t the time or place for games. Plus you were really hot and I don’t mean that as in sexy, although you are super hot that way too, but this time I mean like temperature.”

Shiro gasped in realisation and yanked his hand back as though it had been burned, rather than doing the burning. He pressed his hands flat to the wall behind him, legs tensing as he got ready to spring to his feet. “Lance, I- I’m sorry-”

“No. Shiro, please,” Lance interrupted again, planting his hands on Shiro’s shoulder. As though he could physically stop Shiro from moving. “This time, listen to me.” 

Shiro stared at him with shock that melted into guilt between one pulse of dim white light and the next. It was probably a low blow to play that card when Shiro was vulnerable like this, but what Lance had to say was important and he wasn’t afraid to fight dirty if he had to. The burn didn’t hurt as much just then as he knew it was going to in a few minutes, so he needed to speak fast.

“There’s a light in your arm that happens just before the pain hits, and your eyes get a kind of creepy purple-pink inner glow immediately after. But it’s definitely after. The arm lights up first, then your eyes change, then the pain hits you.” Lance said quickly, watching Shiro’s Galra prosthetic for any changes.

Shiro’s eyes darted between his right arm and Lance’s face, comprehension slowly dawning on him. “You think it’s the arm.”

“Look,” Lance said, “I know it sounds weird-”

“Cut it off.”

Lance’s brain stalled. “What?”

“Cut it off,” Shiro repeated insistently. “Get rid of it.” 

Lance turned back to the arm in time to see precisely when the glow started. He dove forwards to wrap one hand around the prosthetic wrist and the other around the back of Shiro’s head just as a pained groan forced its way past his teeth. Shiro’s human hand grabbed his arm painfully tight, but Lance was far too focused on wrestling with Shiro’s Galra-powered arm to worry about meer human strength, no matter how strong Shiro was.

He had eight new gouges raked across his armour and another burn before Shiro finally came back, the light lingering in his eyes for a breathless moment before it faded and Lance was again staring into exhausted grey eyes. They were close enough that Lance could feel Shiro’s rasping breaths against his lips, and of all the situations Lance had imagined that happening, this one had never come up.

“If there’s even a chance that this thing is trying to take me over, it needs to go. Now.” Shiro said, voice hard and firm despite his breathlessness only seconds before. “I don’t know if I’ll get the chance to do it myself before I’m no longer me.”

Lance swallowed hard and nodded. “Right. Yes. I can- I’ll do that.”

Shiro sighed, his whole body unwinding with relief. “Thank you.”

Right. Lance could definitely do this. He took a breath to steel himself and dropped his hand to his hip to draw out the red bayard, forming it into the shape of a broadsword with a thought. This was not how he’d imagined using it when he’d first unlocked it, but if he was right about Shiro’s arm, at least he could do something good with it.

He hoped he was right.

Shiro’s eyes widened when he saw the blade, and if the whole situation weren’t so serious Lance might have asked if he’d forgotten that Lance had a sword now too. Of course, that raised the uncomfortable possibility that Shiro had expected Lance to have to shoot his arm off and had asked him to do it anyway, and that thought was slightly sickening. Shiro recovered from his surprise quickly and held his arm out in front of him while Lance shuffled around on his knees until he was in a position where he thought he’d be able to swing down onto Shiro’s arm without risking cutting any other part of him. 

He adjusted his grip and another breath telling himself that he wasn’t stalling, he was just preparing

“Lance,” Shiro said quietly, making Lance jump. His gaze darted over to find Shiro giving him a shaky but encouraging smile. “You’ve got this.”

“How the quiznak can you be so calm?” Lance mumbled, shifting nervously on his heels. “You’re about to lose your right arm. Again.”

“I don’t need it,” Shiro said, his smile softening. He placed his free hand gently on Lance’s arm. “I’ve got my right arm right here.”

Lance’s breath caught in his chest again, face flushing red as he tried to absorb that. “Oh my god, that is the cheesiest thing I’ve ever heard,” he mumbled. 

Shiro chuckled warmly, looking far too pleased with himself, and Lance couldn’t think of any comeback to that. He still wasn’t thinking when he raised his free hand and slid it over Shiro’s jaw to tilt his head up a fraction either; Perhaps the adrenaline or fear was making him bold. Shiro’s stared at him with open shock for one blink of light, and by the next Lance was kissing him, his nervous and too-dry lips against Shiro’s own bitten and chapped ones. 

When Lance imagined his first kiss with Shiro, immediately before a field amputation had never come up as a possibility. It still set his blood fizzing and made his lips tingle at the too-fleeting touch. He immediately wanted to do it again.

“Sorry,” Lance whispered against Shiro’s lips, pulling back to a safer distance. Shiro didn’t answer, instead staring at him with a dazed look that gave Lance a brief moment of pride before he remembered that it was probably the surprise of being suddenly kissed that did that and not his personal skill at kissing. Oh well.

Without waiting for a reply and before he could lose his nerve, Lance raised his sword.

* * *

Another empty hallway greeted Hunk as he peered around the corner. “You sure you haven’t seen them leave this hall?” He stage-whispered into his com. Keith stepped up behind him, barely sparing an unimpressed glance his way before stepping around him and creeping up the hall on silent feet.

“It’s hard to say,” Coran responded over their helmets. “Shiro knows where most of the cameras down there are, so he could probably avoid them if he wanted to. But he didn’t seem to be avoiding them on the way down so… Your guess is as good as mine.”

“That isn’t Shiro,” Keith responded without any real heat, moving on quickly to his next question rather than arguing the point. “Any response from Lance yet?”

Hunk fell in behind him, trying to mimic the almost cat-like way that Keith walked in an effort not to make too much noise. He wasn’t exactly successful, his own heavier steps echoing audibly up the hallway, but he was trying.

“I’m afraid not, number… huh. How tall are you these days?” Coran asked. Keith ignored him.

The pair moved in tense silence up the hallway. Hunk’s attempts to ask Keith to explain what exactly was going on hung over him like a fleet blimps filled with unanswered questions. He was willing to set them aside at least until they’d rescued Lance from the apparently crazed Shiro, but as soon as Lance was safe he was going to start demanding answers. Starting with why Keith arrived with an almost perfect duplicate of Shiro, the sight of which apparently made their local Shiro go completely berserk.

A couple of meters in front of them, an arm wearing black was stuck out of a doorway. It waved up and down, flopping limply as it was shaken. Hunk immediately stepped back and raised his gun to his shoulder, while Keith took up a lowered stance beside him, his luxite blade growing to its full form as he prepared for combat.

Instead of the expected attack however, the arm was flung out of the doorway, landing limply on the floor in front of them with a heavy, metallic clunk. The pair both stared at it dumbfounded, weapons lowered as they tried to understand exactly what they were looking at. Well, they knew what they were looking at. That was clearly Shiro’s arm. They just didn’t understand why they were looking at it, how it got there, or why it wasn’t attached to Shiro. So all the important questions were unanswered.

“Don’t shoot!” Shiro shouted from inside the room the arm had just been thrown from. “I’m unarmed.”

Hunk looked between the doorway and the metallic arm on the ground in front of him for a moment before Shiro’s words fully registered. “ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!” He shouted.

As though triggered by his voice, the arm on the ground suddenly powered up, a bright magenta glow burning across the surface. The fingers twitched and pulled themselves up, dragging the rest of the arm behind them as though it were preparing to move on it’s own. 

Hunk shrieked and opened fire on it before it could do anything else, only stopping when the cloud of sparks and smoke got too much for him to be able to see through. “Is it dead?” He asked.

“It was never alive,” Keith replied, rising out of the crouched position he’d adopted when Hunk started shooting. “But it’s definitely stopped moving now.”

“Hey, if you guys are done shooting out there,” Lance called from the same room that Shiro was apparently in, voice thready in a way that told Hunk that he’d been injured. “Can you agree not to shoot either of us when we come out?”

“Lance, buddy!”Hunk shouted back. “What’s wrong, why do you sound hurt?”

“It’s nothing-” Lance said before he was interrupted by Shiro.

“Lance needs medical attention as soon as possible for some severe burns,” he reported, fear creeping into his voice. 

Hunk opened his mouth to reply, but stopped himself and looked over to Keith. As the person who had declared that this Shiro was somehow ‘Not the real Shiro’, Hunk thought it was probably safer to defer to Keith on this. He hoped Keith could pick up on the ‘Okay, how do you want to play this?’ vibes that he was trying to put out to him. 

Keith’s eyes narrowed at the door, but he nodded. “Okay. We won’t attack, but if you try anything else, you will regret it,” he called back.

There was a whispered argument from behind the door, almost inaudible over the fizzle of the Galran arm cooling. The whispers ended and Lance stepped out of the room, pulling Shiro’s out into the hall behind him. Shiro squared his shoulders and placed his remaining hand on Lance’s back, gently trying to maneuver him to step back, which Lance completely ignored. Instead, he to planted himself directly in front of Shiro and raised his arms in surrender with a wince.

“So.” Lance looked between Keith and Hunk, who gave him a supportive smile and a small wave. “I think we both really need to see Coran now,” he said.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Bingo prompt "Handshake". The scene that started this whole thing was Shiro detatchig his arm and shaking it through a door shoulting “DON’T SHOOT, I’M UNARMED!” XD Not the handshake the prompt probably meant, but I wanted to try something a little off-the-wall. And, of course, I added angst to it, because I'm basic.
> 
> I want to write a follow-up to this about how the team deal as well as go some more into the newly depening relationship. Plus I've got some ideas that I had floating around without any context that just flow wonderfully on from this, but this thing was already pretty long for a bingo fill. I still might, because I really want to ^_^ but it'll have to wait a little while yet.


End file.
